Team dynamics and conflict resolution

Business

Teams and Conflict

Conflict is defined as a disagreement through which parties perceive a threat to their needs, interests or concerns (About Conflict, n.d.). Team conflict is a natural disagreement resulting from individuals in groups that differ in their attitudes, beliefs, values or needs. It can also start off from past rivalries or personality differences. Other causes of conflict include trying to negotiate before the time is right or before all the needed information is available (Managing Conflict, n.d.).

The role that conflict plays in work teams is determined by the manner in which it is managed. Conflict is a powerful force that can result in improved decision-making processes and progressive team development. Teams must learn to be challenging without destroying the team as a whole. Teams that are able to handle conflict and perform at a high level are able to manage conflict constructively. Teams capable of mediating their own conflicts, tend improve both productivity and member relationships (Managing Conflict in Work Teams, n.d.).

A great deal of empirical and theoretical attention has been focused on intragroup conflict and its impact on team performance. An empirical study is one that is performed in order to uses statistics to make an indisputable point (What is an Empirical Study, n.d.) There have been two recent developments in this line of research. The first development is that experts have begun to question the notion that measuring levels of conflict by using a tri-partite classification, which involves task, relationship, and process conflict, will reliably explain group performance. A number of academics have also reported negative and contradictory associations between process conflict and performance (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

The second development in the area of group conflict literature is the move away from the notion that different types of conflict have a direct impact on team performance. There is a move toward thinking that various aspects of group process and group dynamics serve to improve the impact that conflict has on the outcome of the group (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

Taking a closer look at these developments in the focus of the article The Critical Role of Conflict Resolution in Teams: A Close Look at the Links Between Conflict Type, Conflict Management Strategies, and Team Outcomes, in which the researchers take a closer look at the effects of conflict resolution. In this study they set out to look at how conflict resolution strategies are associated with the impact of task, relationship, and process conflicts on group outputs. Along with how different approaches to managing each type of conflict are associated with increases vs. decreases in team performance (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

The purpose of this study was to examine specific conflict resolution strategies in groups in order to better understand their potential effects on group outcomes such as performance and satisfaction. In order to accomplish what they set out to do they looked at teams with consistently high or increasing group performance and member satisfaction and consistently low or decreasing group performance and member satisfaction. They looked to see which conflict resolution strategies are associated with each of three commonly measured conflict types: task, relationship, and process conflict. Because a very small amount of research has been done to examine the impact of intragroup conflict resolution strategies, this study is important to see what strategies do autonomous work groups create to self-manage their team conflict (Behfar and Peterson, 2008). I agree that this research is important to be able to explore this concept so that it can be shared for many groups to take advantage of.

Sampling is a worry in both qualitative and quantitative research. In any study, the research question determines what the study method will be. But it is the research question and method together that determine the sampling plan, the type of sample used, and the number of people who will make up the study sample. "Other factors that affect decisions about sample sizes and sampling plans include time, money, access to subjects, and the number of study variables" (Beyea and Nicoll, 1997).

The research sample that was used for this study consisted of the entire 1st-year MBA class of 252 students, or 65 study teams, at an East Coast graduate school of management. "The participants worked in the same teams across all four of their first semester core curriculum classes, and the team portion of their work counted for at least 40% of each individual's grade in each class" (Behfar and Peterson, 2008). This sample was chosen because it represented newly forming, intact autonomous groups that had no previous history (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

While these teams were made up of students, the atmosphere and consequences of the work were comparable to that of autonomous business teams with both task-related work as well as social relationship. The fact that the teams were just forming and had begun their work with the same baseline resources was important to this study in terms of differentiating the effectiveness of team conflict management strategies (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

The data that was analyzed in this study was a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses (Behfar and Peterson, 2008). The aim of qualitative analysis is to have a complete, detailed description and the point of quantitative analysis is to be able to classify features, count them, and even construct more complex statistical models in an attempt to explain what is observed (Qualitative vs. Quantitative Analysis (n.d.). There were links made between the qualitative process and quantitative outcome data. Open-ended survey questions were used to gather qualitative data about team norms, conflicts, and conflict management. This type of question was chosen because it elicits brief yet detailed team member accounts, minimizes demand characteristics because it does not constrain team members' options to discuss certain types of conflict/management behaviors, and usually captures the most salient or important aspects of team processes (Behfar and Peterson, 2008). Open ended survey questions allow participants to respond in any way they want. Open-ended questions provide primarily qualitative data, and are often used in exploratory research (Survey Questions, 2005). The researchers chose not to use existing conflict management inventories in this study because they were interested in capturing detail about team-level development and application of different strategies to different types of conflicts. They also collected data in order to assess satisfaction (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

The teams were given two surveys that included both open-ended and close-ended questions. The first survey was administered after the teams had completed their first group assignment. Their responses were taken prior to the students receiving their grades to ensure that they reported their observations about their group experiences instead of their reactions to the group's grade. The survey contained an open-ended question about team norms and a close-ended measure of satisfaction (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

The second survey was identical to the first one but also included two open-ended questions asking team members to describe the conflicts they had since their first group assignment and how they dealt with or managed those conflicts. The second survey was administered after the group had completed their second assignment but before they received a grade for that assignment or their final course grade (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

One method that was used to analyze some of the data in this study was that of concept mapping. This is the process of creating a concept map which is a special form of a web diagram used for exploring knowledge and gathering and sharing information. "A concept map consists of nodes or cells that contain a concept, item or question and links" (Concept Map, n.d.).

The links are named and indicate direction with an arrow symbol. The labeled links explain the relationship s that exists between the nodes. The arrow explains the direction of the relationship and reads like a sentence (Concept Map, n.d.).

The concept mapping method can best be thought of as participatory content analysis and as a cross between traditional content analysis and semantic mapping analysis. The researchers chose to use this method to analyze the conflict resolution responses because the research objective was to understand how participants themselves think about conflict resolution strategies. Concept mapping combines exploratory statistical analysis with participants' judgments in order to produce clusters of similar thematic categories by using multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. The analysis itself is a five-step process: (a) determining units of analysis, (b) participant sorting of units, (c) multidimensional scaling analysis, (d) cluster analysis, and (e) cluster labeling. This analysis of conflict resolution statements resulted in seven categories of conflict resolution strategies: voting, compromise or consensus, discuss or debate, open communication, idiosyncratic solutions, avoided or ignored, and rotating responsibilities (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

The results of this study showed that 37% of the sample demonstrated consistently high or increasing outcome trends. Twenty-five percent of the sample demonstrated consistently low or decreasing outcome trends, 19% of the sample, demonstrated consistently high or increasing performance but consistently low or decreasing satisfaction and 19% of the sample, demonstrated consistently low or decreasing performance but consistently high or increasing satisfaction. The results of this study showed that while teams may have reported using strategies from the same conflict resolution categories, the way that they applied those strategies to resolve different conflicts was often associated with very different patterns of change in performance and satisfaction (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

There are two interrelated theoretical contributions that this study shows. The first is to provide facts about how teams manage task, relationship, and process conflicts along with the performance and satisfaction tradeoffs associated with choices in conflict resolution strategies. The second is the fact that participant driven categorization of team conflict management does loosely map onto current individual-level conflict management typologies (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).

Additions that can be made to current literature from these results come from comparing management of the three types of conflict between different outcome patterns. The researchers felt that rather than applying mapping on an individual-level of conflict management styles onto the findings, the results of this study would be better characterized by a different set of criteria. These being the criteria for team viability: "(a) The team must meet the expectations of those who receive their work (i.e., performance); (b) the team needs to satisfy the individual needs of members in the group experience (i.e., individual member satisfaction), and (c) the process the group uses (e.g., conflict management tactics) must enhance its ability to work together in the future" (Behfar and Peterson, 2008).